Historical Jesus

willhud9 wrote:Except in what Scripture is Jesus NOT human? Paul never argues that he is not human, nor does Paul argue that he is God. Jesus is Jesus. The other sources that are non-Christian do not paint Jesus as a God, or non-human. He is Jesus. To claim otherwise, is a silly apologetic attempt at interpreting Paul's epistles. You accuse HJ's of apologetics, I can accuse MJers of doing the same thing.

Yep, 'cause they are "interpreting" - but, judging from the numbers of denominations and sects of Christendom, the epistles can be interpreted a whole bunch of different ways. The "correct" interpretation depends upon what you presuppose from what you have been taught.

The suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is human too - except he's not - unless you believe he is a prophecy of Jesus. The suffering servant is actually the personification of the faithful followers of Yahweh and not a human person.

"In what scripture is Jesus NOT human"? In all of them - he only sounds human. He is a miraculous human who performs miraculous deeds and who is omniscient. He knows of his own death and resurrection before it happens and institutes a communion of bread and wine representing the body and blood of himself. He knows beforehand that he is the representative of the sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter and that his death takes away the sin of the world etc. That's not a human. The scriptural Jesus is the only Jesus there is - Josephus and Tacitus are merely repeating hearsay of what the followers of the scriptural Jesus in the late first century believed.

Josephus and Tacitus don't add or report a thing about Jesus that is not already found in the gospels. Celsus reports that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera but Jesus ben Pantera lived during the time of Jannaeus and was stoned to death and hanged on a tree the day before the Passover in 88 BCE. That's the Jewish report but you know how those Jews lie...

If one is honest with himself he would see that the evidence for a MJ are myriad but evidence for a HJ are the gospels and nothing else.

The possibility that Jesus is mythical should not be ruled out by the likes of Ehrman and his followers, but they do rule it out. It's no surprise though, after all, we are discussing a religious figure from The Bible, and we know how passionate and superstitious people can be when it comes to The Bible, as if there is a rule that it must contain some truth about history and its characters that play a role in the stories.